Sick: A Memoir

by Porochista Khakpour (Harper Perennial, $16)

The author in 2014: A ghost in her own mind

Charlie Forgham-Bailey/eyevine/Redux

“Sick isn’t written like a manifesto, but it is one,” said Lidija Haas in The New Yorker. Porochista Khakpour, a novelist and university lecturer, has been plagued for years by an illness, or combination of illnesses, for which she often has had no name. Dizziness, fainting, all-over aches, depression, a need for a cane—such have been her symptoms. Only recently has the 40-year-old author been able to have confidence that she has chronic Lyme disease, a problematic diagnosis in itself. But while another writer might respond by constructing a tightly argued polemic, “it can seem that Khakpour is daring the reader to find her draining, histrionic, inconsistent.” That feels intentional: “She is making the case that nobody should have to be a reliable narrator in order to receive basic respect and compassionate treatment.”

Khakpour can’t even say when she contracted Lyme, said Rien Fertel in AVClub​.com. Was it at a Los Angeles park at age 5? While vacationing in the Hamptons in her 20s? She can’t recall the tick bite that would have infected her. Instead, she speaks of a more enduring dis-ease. “As a child, I thought of myself as a ghost,” she writes, and she ties the persistence of her sense of disconnect between her mind and body to her past as a child refugee of war in Iran and her experience in America of being a woman of color. She has become used to being laughed at by some doctors, receiving dire diagnoses and useless pills from others. And because her story has no simple arc, she relates it episodically, tying chapters to the places she lived and men she lived with, creating “a book that might one day join the shelf of, for lack of a better term, sick-lit classics, including Illness as Metaphor.”

In the end, “Khakpour’s memoir isn’t really about Lyme; it’s about modern life,” said Eve Fairbanks in Slate.com. Her experience of illness, real as it is, could be any blow that knocks a person off the path to success and contentment, the path we’re told we should be on. Again and again, Khakpour hunts for the “aha” moment when her illness will be named, its symptoms defeated, and her life allowed to blossom. What’s original about her tale is that it reveals, “with unsettling clarity,” how the resulting disappointments can be cumulatively as poisoning as any tick bite. Modern life is wounding; “perhaps it’s the search for the aha moment, one that resolves conflict and pain for good, that’s making us so unhappy.”